Solution Engineer

Overview

You're the technical expert helping prospects understand how Blacksmith will work in their environment. You're running proof-of-value projects where companies migrate a subset of GitHub Actions workflows to Blacksmith, measuring the speed improvements, and troubleshooting integration issues. Your buyers are platform engineers and engineering managers who need to see it work before committing.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Early-stage (35 employees, recently hit revenue milestone)

Size: 35 employees

Growth: Just closed largest deal, hiring across GTM to handle demand

Market Position: Challenger to GitHub Actions and other CI/CD acceleration tools

GTM Reality

Your Role in the Sales Process:

• AEs bring you in after initial discovery when prospect is interested but needs to see it work
• You run technical deep-dives, scope proof-of-value projects, and guide implementation
• You're in 3-5 active POVs at any time, plus supporting 10-15 earlier-stage deals with technical questions

Team Structure: Small SE team (they're hiring), likely 1:3 or 1:4 SE-to-AE ratio initially

Product Complexity: Drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions, but every company's CI/CD setup is different - custom workflows, different build tools, various Docker configurations

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: GitHub Actions (native), BuildKite, CircleCI, self-hosted runners

Technical Differentiation: Bare metal gaming CPUs, NVMe caching for Docker layers, minimal workflow changes needed

Common Technical Objections: "Our builds are already optimized", "What about security/compliance?", "How do secrets/environment variables work?", "What's the migration effort?"

Your Job: Prove Blacksmith is 2-3x faster with minimal changes, address security concerns, make migration look easy

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Active POVs (40%) | Discovery/Scoping (25%) | Internal Product/Docs (20%) | Customer Calls (15%)

Key Activities

• Technical discovery: You're on calls with platform engineers asking about their GitHub Actions setup - what workflows they run, what's slow (tests? builds? Docker layers?), what their current runtime and costs are. You're identifying 2-3 workflows to migrate for POV.
• Proof-of-value setup: You're helping prospects configure Blacksmith runners, migrate a subset of workflows, and measure before/after build times. This means reading YAML configs, debugging runner issues, and ensuring apples-to-apples comparisons.
• Troubleshooting: Workflows that worked on GitHub Actions sometimes have issues on Blacksmith. You're debugging why a Docker build is failing, why a test is flaky, or why caching isn't working as expected. This requires reading CI logs and understanding the full build process.
• Demo and architecture calls: Walking prospects through how Blacksmith works under the hood, explaining the caching architecture, discussing security/networking for self-hosted runners, and answering technical questions that come up in deals.
• Product feedback loop: You're the front line hearing what prospects need. You're documenting common questions, feature requests, and integration gaps, then working with engineering on product improvements.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Every company's CI/CD setup is a snowflake. You're dealing with monorepos, polyglot builds, custom Docker images, matrix builds, and weird workflow dependencies. There's no standard demo - you're customizing every POV.
• Engineers are skeptical. They've seen "2x faster" claims before. If the POV doesn't show clear improvement, the deal dies. The pressure to make the proof work is on you.
• You're context-switching between 5+ different prospects' environments - remembering who uses Bazel vs Gradle, who has the flaky test suite, who's blocked on security review.
• At a 35-person company, you're building SE processes as you go. There's no mature playbook - you're figuring out POV best practices, creating demo environments, and writing docs.
• You'll hit issues where the product doesn't quite work for a prospect's use case. You're the one who has to figure out workarounds or escalate to engineering.

What Success Looks Like

• POVs showing 2-3x build speed improvements and measurable cost savings, leading to closed deals
• High win rate on deals where you run POVs (70-80%)
• Prospects saying "this was easier than we expected" and engineers actually wanting to expand usage
• Building repeatable POV patterns and documentation that make future deals faster

Who You're Working With

Internal:

• AEs (you're supporting their deals, they bring you in at right time)
• Engineering (you're escalating bugs, requesting features, explaining customer needs)
• Product (you're their eyes/ears on what prospects actually care about)

External:

• Platform Engineering Managers (decision makers, care about team productivity)
• Senior/Staff Platform Engineers (hands-on technical evaluators, will implement it)
• DevOps Engineers (involved in setup, operations, monitoring)

What They Care About:

• Does it actually work with our setup?: They have monorepos, specific build tools, custom workflows - will Blacksmith handle it?
• How much effort to migrate?: Can they do it incrementally? Will they need to rewrite workflows?
• Performance proof: They want to see actual build logs with timestamps showing 2x+ speedup
• Security and compliance: How are secrets handled? Network access? SOC 2? They need answers for infosec.

Requirements

• 2-4 years as Solutions Engineer, DevOps Engineer, or Platform Engineer - you need hands-on CI/CD experience
• Deep understanding of GitHub Actions, Docker, and CI/CD pipelines - you should be able to read workflow YAML and debug build failures
• Experience running technical POVs or pilots with engineering teams
• Comfortable on calls with senior engineers - you need to earn technical credibility
• Ability to context-switch between multiple prospects' technical environments
• Strong written communication for creating POV plans, technical documentation, and summarizing results
• Bonus: Experience with BuildKite, CircleCI, Jenkins, or other CI/CD tools